###Live Caption:Tobias Wolff (cq), one of America's most important short story writers, author of "This Boy's Life" and "Old School." Wolff teaches English at Stanford's Wallace Stegner School of Creative Writing, and is very fond of his family dog, "Paddy" a standard poodle.###Caption History:WOLFF24046_rad.jpg Tobias Wolff (cq), one of America's most important short story writers, author of "This Boy's Life" and "Old School." Wolff teaches English at Stanford's Wallace Stegner School of Creative Writing, and is very fond of his family dog, "Paddy" a standard poodle. KATY RADDATZ / The Chronicle Tobias Wolff, who teaches English at Stanford's Wallace Stegner School of Creative Writing, relaxes with his dog Paddy.###Notes:###Special Instructions:CAT MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND SF CHRONICLE/NO SALES-MAGS OUT

Our Story Begins

New and Selected Stories

KNOPF; 400 PAGES; $26.95

Man is, above all, the storytelling animal. The narratives we create - religious, mythic, literary - are the essential way we make sense of our lives and cultures. Without them, we would drift in a numbed, directionless stupor, condemned to an unimaginably brain-dead, eternal Now.

For more than three decades, Tobias Wolff has honed the craft of making sublime art out of the short-story form. Though he has published two fine memoirs - the classic "This Boy's Life" and "In Pharaoh's Army" - it is his short stories that have made him an indispensable figure on the American literary landscape. Indeed, his "The Barracks Thief" is more novella than novel, and his novel "Old School" has the shape and feel of related stories.

After producing two story collections, "In the Garden of the North American Martyrs" and "Back in the World," Wolff was honored in 1989 with the prestigious Rea Award for excellence in the short story. Until now, "The Night in Question," from 1996, was his only other collection.

"Our Story Begins" gathers 21 of his most notable stories from previous books and adds 10 new ones. Its title sets the dominant motif: that we are the stories we tell about each other. Within this context, truths are elusive and ever-shifting. Lies aren't so much their polar opposite as ancillary and legitimate means of embellishing the tale.

Wolff's stories often circle around the pangs of love and loss. To this time-honored theme, he often adds a signature gloss, arising out of the real-life events of "This Boy's Life," on the psychological toll of the absent father and the shattering of childhood illusions.

"The Liar," for example, makes deft use of much of Wolff's thematic and stylistic arsenal. That teenage James has fallen into a pattern of compulsive lying is portrayed as fallout from his father's early death. Thus his white lies aren't malicious, but whimsical first strikes designed to stave off chaos. The author's means of telling the story elevates it from the merely pathological into an eerie, quasi-surreal realm. Rather than merely documenting domestic travail, this tale and many others point obliquely to the ubiquitous mysteries within the everyday.

Another Wolffian tic is to wrap stories within stories. The cocaine-laced partiers of "Leviathan" indulge in a spasm of intimate revelations. In "The Night in Question" the knotty relationship between a brother and sister is entwined in the man's recounting to her of an ethical dilemma he's heard in a sermon.

Wolff can shift fearlessly from dark comedy to mournful yet sober lamentation. Like many American men, those in "Hunters in the Snow" aren't so much genuine comrades as uneasy competitors for status. The fat guy and the New Sensitive Man join forces to undermine the jerk who makes fun of both; it's the last one who ends up bleeding and neglected, lying in the cold in the back of their pickup.

While "Hunters" provokes yuks, admittedly ghastly, "Flyboys" serves the melancholy straight up. The preteens here are little men-in-training, absorbing rituals of bonding and exclusion amid their play. One boy, left alone when his friend is called inside to be told some awful news, shoots basketball by himself: "The sound grew louder and larger and emptier, the sound of emptiness itself, emptiness throbbing like a headache."

Of the 10 new stories, only two are disappointing, the rest entirely satisfying. Three are masterful juxtapositions of people not usually considered equals - professor and student, professional and thief, abductor and victim. Speaking truth to power, Wolff conjures up the unexpected.

The middle-aged, female ex-Marine of "A Mature Student" lacks the worldly sophistication of her stern, foreign-accented art history professor. But their conversation transforms a college smoking room into a confessional, with cowardice and moral dilemmas as subjects, the student as priest.

The international aid administrator in "The Benefit of the Doubt" bears both the authority and benevolence of the industrialized powers. But how much clout does he have up against a Gypsy pickpocket in Rome? Pity, which can mask contempt, faces off here against a desperation forged in the streets.

Abducted from a parking lot after an evening at a bar, a high school teacher in "The White Bible" imagines the worst: rape or murder. But her captor turns out to be the outraged father of a student about to be expelled. What he wants is justice for the boy; what he gets is humiliation.

Wolff's alchemy in these stories is oddly and deeply transformative. They inevitably rise above their ostensible subject into some universal terrain. How Wolff achieves this effect is something of a miracle. He manages without a particularly striking prose style. What he has in spades, though, is intelligence, compassion and a radical openness to life's unfathomable surprises. {sbox}